1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a character train search apparatus for searching any character string of a sentence input as an image.
2. Related Background Art
In a conventional image editing apparatus, a character area is trimmed from sentences input as raster images, part of the character area is deleted, a new character pattern is inserted in or added to the sentences, or a given character pattern is moved from one position to another.
In the image editing apparatus described above, since standard character codes (JIS and ASCII codes) are not obtained by character recognition, no means for searching any desired character train from the input character image is available. Therefore, the sentence image is displayed on a display and a desired character string must be searched one by one while an operator observes the screen.
Each character of the input sentence image may be converted into a corresponding standard character code by a conventional character recognition apparatus. However, when a large number of sentence image patterns are to be searched, the recognition processing is inevitably performed on characters excluded from the characters of interest, thus wasting the time and degrading efficiency.
An electronic filing apparatus is available as a conventional apparatus for storing and preserving a document as an image.
The above conventional apparatuses, however, cannot immediately access or display the page to be referenced by the user. The user must check the contents from the first page to the end page to search a page of interest. When one document consists of many pages, search access is time-consuming.